Thursday, February 14, 2013

Can someone - anyone - please explain to me why you would rather die than live. I just can't understand the concept.

The fact is that we now possess the medical skills to figure out the problem of disease and aging (same thing) and to prevent people - YOU - from dying. But "geniuses" like Steve Jobs would rather spend millions on a big boat rather than preventing their own death. Crazy.

Meanwhile, your life ticks away...tick tick...No matter how much you enjoy today and how great your life is, you are throwing away an eternity by simply failing to support medical research.

Of course our "leaders" are idiots who are doing the same thing...And billionaires - with the money to fund research - buy useless junk instead of saving their lives..and their children's...

But we can do something. Not dying is the most important thing you can do for yourself and your loved ones. We need to all work together and solve this problem. If we spent half the $600 billion we in the USA now spend on the military and put this into medical research...we wouldn't die. It's as simple as that.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Don't you understand - you are getting older and will die, because so little is being done to stop the aging process.

Each day you are closer to death. And yet...you do nothing about it.

What is especially strange is the rich and powerful, who spend millions on big house, boats, fancy clothes, gems, art...and yet they won't spend money to save their own lives. Or their children's.

Let's all work together to support research to stop aging. We don't have to die. Life is precious. Spend your money to support research. I want to raise $1 billion to stop aging. Help me, help yourself. Everything else is pointless, a huge waste.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Fish oil may be the true elixir of youth, according to new evidence of its effect on biological ageing. Omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil preserve the genetic "fuse" that determines the lifespan of cells, say scientists.

The discovery, made in heart disease patients, may explain many of the claimed health benefits of omega-3.

Taking fish oil supplements is said to protect against heart disease, improve survival rates after a heart attack, reduce mental decline in old age and help to prevent age-related changes in the eye that can lead to blindness. Research has also shown that rodents live one-third longer when given a diet enriched with fish-derived omega-3.

Although omega-3 fatty acids have powerful anti-inflammatory properties and lower levels of some blood fats, the mechanisms behind these effects are poorly understood. The new research suggests that omega-3 has a direct effect on biological ageing by slowing down the rate at which protective caps on the ends of chromosomes shorten.

The caps, called telomeres, are made from copied strands of DNA and have a similar function to bookends or the plastic ends of shoelaces. They prevent the ends of chromosomes – the "packages" of DNA in the cell nucleus – becoming damaged and keep the DNA organised and contained.

Each time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter until a critical point is reached. DNA then becomes damaged and the cell stops dividing, and may die. In this way, the telomere acts like a biological fuse.

The rate at which the fuse "burns" can vary both between individual people and individual cells. This is believed to have an impact on age-related diseases.

US scientists conducting the research looked at the effect of omega-3 fatty acids on telomere shortening in 608 hospital out-patients with heart disease. At the start of the study, measurements were taken of the length of chromosomal telomeres in the patients' white blood cells. Blood levels of the two fish-derived omega-3 fatty acids docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) were also measured.

The tests were carried out again after five years, and showed a clear correlation with omega-3 intake. Patients consuming the least omega-3 had the fastest rate of telomere shortening, while those in the top 25% of consumption levels had the slowest rate.

The scientists, led by Dr Ramin Farzaneh-Far of the University of California at San Francisco, wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association: "The present findings identify deceleration of telomere attrition as a potentially novel pathway for the anti-ageing effects of marine omega-3 fatty acids.

"In summary, among patients with stable coronary artery disease, there was an inverse relationship between baseline blood levels of marine omega-3 fatty acids and the rate of telomere shortening over five years ... These findings raise the possibility that omega-3 fatty acids may protect against cellular ageing in patients with coronary heart disease.

Monday, February 4, 2013

I can't help saying how stupid the Super Bowl is. We should be spending our money on medical research to save our lives.

Instead, we spent $12 billion on ads, chicken wings, and other money for over-sized men to play a game.

Give me $12 billion and I will cure the disease of aging. Wouldn't that make more sense than watching a pointless game? Who cares who wins - you are still going to age and die. Wouldn't it make more sense to NOT die?

Yes, death is inevitable; but so is tooth decay. But I fight tooth decay. Similarly, I want to fight a life-span that was genetically enforced hundreds of thousands of years ago, when we lived in caves. The world has changed since then, and it's time to update our bodies, our genes, and stop aging.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

If Aubrey de Grey's predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.

A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to "cure" aging -- banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.

"I'd say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I'd call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so," de Grey said in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain's Royal Institution academy of science.

"And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today."De Grey sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular "maintenance," which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape.De Grey lives near Cambridge University where he won his doctorate in 2000 and is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he co-founded in 2009.He describes aging as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body."The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic," he explained.

CHALLENGEExactly how far and how fast life expectancy will increase in the future is a subject of some debate, but the trend is clear. An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year at the moment and experts estimate there could be a million centenarians across the world by 2030.

To date, the world's longest-living person on record lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010.Some researchers say, however, that the trend toward longer lifespan may falter due to an epidemic of obesity now spilling over from rich nations into the developing world.De Grey's ideas may seem far-fetched, but $20,000 offered in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review journal for any molecular biologist who showed that de Grey's SENS theory was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate" was never won.The judges on that panel were prompted into action by an angry put-down of de Grey from a group of nine leading scientists who dismissed his work as "pseudo science."They concluded that this label was not fair, arguing instead that SENS "exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt."

CELL THERAPYFor some, the prospect of living for hundreds of years is not particularly attractive, either, as it conjures up an image of generations of sick, weak old people and societies increasingly less able to cope.

But de Grey says that's not what he's working for. Keeping the killer diseases of old age at bay is the primary focus."This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health," he told Reuters. "This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health."De Grey divides the damage caused by aging into seven main categories for which repair techniques need to be developed if his prediction for continual maintenance is to come true.He notes that while for some categories, the science is still in its earliest stages, there are others where it's already almost there."Stem cell therapy is a big part of this. It's designed to reverse one type of damage, namely the loss of cells when cells die and are not automatically replaced, and it's already in clinical trials (in humans)," he said.Stem cell therapies are currently being trialed in people with spinal cord injuries, and de Grey and others say they may one day be used to find ways to repair disease-damaged brains and hearts.

NO AGE LIMIT

Cardiovascular diseases are the world's biggest age-related killers and de Grey says there is a long way to go on these though researchers have figured out the path to follow.Heart diseases that cause heart failure, heart attacks and strokes are brought about by the accumulation of certain types of what de Grey calls "molecular garbage" -- byproducts of the body's metabolic processes -- which our bodies are not able to break down or excrete."The garbage accumulates inside the cell, and eventually it gets in the way of the cell's workings," he said.De Grey is working with colleagues in the United States to identify enzymes in other species that can break down the garbage and clean out the cells -- and the aim then is to devise genetic therapies to give this capability to humans."If we could do that in the case of certain modified forms of cholesterol which accumulate in cells of the artery wall, then we simply would not get cardiovascular disease," he said.De Grey is reluctant to make firm predictions about how long people will be able to live in future, but he does say that with each major advance in longevity, scientists will buy more time to make yet more scientific progress.In his view, this means that the first person who will live to 1,000 is likely to be born less than 20 years after the first person to reach 150."I call it longevity escape velocity -- where we have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of therapies to enable us to push back the ill health of old age faster than time is passing. And that way, we buy ourselves enough time to develop more therapies further as time goes on," he said."What we can actually predict in terms of how long people will live is absolutely nothing, because it will be determined by the risk of death from other causes like accidents," he said."But there really shouldn't be any limit imposed by how long ago you were born. The whole point of maintenance is that it works indefinitely."